Many internet addresses employ representational state transfer information (known as “REST information”) to specify the contents of a web page. The REST information is used by the server to retrieve and provide the web page. For example, selecting a book at the Web Site of Amazon.com takes you to a link: amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0321213432/qid=1107977455/sr=1-8/ref=sr—1—8/104-2847832-6485547?v=glance&s=books. Everything after the domain name may be REST information (the http://www has been omitted from the link above).
REST information is not only useful to the server: it can also be useful for the user. A browser will record the entire link, including the REST information, to allow a user to use the back button on a browser and get back to a prior-viewed page, or a user can bookmark the link. The user can also cut the link from the browser's address box, and provide it in an e-mail message, for example. In either case, the link can be used to navigate directly to the page desired, bypassing the site navigation tools that would otherwise be required to get there if one had only the domain name.
The representational state transfer information may contain information that can be useful for other purposes. For example, John Udell's Library Lookup Bookmarklets scrapes the ISBN from the REST information used in popular book retailer's web sites to show a user whether one or more specified libraries carries the book being viewed on the retailer's web site.
Another form of information that the user of a web page can use is a title of a web page. The title of a web page is displayed in certain locations, notably across the title bar of the browser window. If the title describes the information in the web page being displayed, the user can use the title to identify the information contained in the web page being displayed. The title may also be captured with a bookmark and used as the title of the bookmark, simplifying the bookmarking process. Additionally, the title can be used as the title of the window, and the title may be displayed in a status area of the operating system, indicating all windows active, to assist the user in selecting among the various windows.
The REST information and the title can change as described above for every web page displayed. This allows the exact location of a web page to be freely available, and the title information to remain current. However, when the information being displayed in a browser contains a Rich Internet Application (known as “RIA”), such as a Flash movie, the title and REST information will not change from the web page used to download the RIA. Thus, the title can become out of sync with the content of the RIA and the REST information only indicates the web page used to navigate to the start of the RIA. This REST information cannot be used to mark a specific point in the RIA for the purposes described above or be used to directly navigate to a point past the starting point of the RIA.
Some web sites have read in REST information in the URI that was either entered by a user or part of a link, to allow a user to jump to a specific web page, but such information was never updated in the address box of the browser as the RIA progressed.
Users also find it helpful to use a browser's “forward” and “back” buttons to move to web pages they have visited before. However, because an RIA may appear as a single web page to the browser, the user is unable to use the browser's forward and back buttons to navigate within an RIA.
What is needed is a system and method that can allow the browser to display REST information that corresponds to various points in a RIA, can utilize the RIA information provided to navigate to a point in the RIA after the start of the RIA and can update the browser title to correspond to the information being displayed in the RIA, and can allow the user to revisit various points in the RIA the user has already visited using the browser's forward and back buttons.